Studying emotion in the field
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Most descriptions of endangered languages focus on forms and structure: what are the vowels? How do you construct the passive? Imagine focusing on how linguistic resources are used emotionally — the creation of affective grammars. What sort of phenomena might we look for and what methods would we use? As a starting off point, I'll discuss my work on Shabo, an endangered isolate spoken in the coffee-growing mountains of Ethiopia. http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~fforum/2011-fall.php
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Studying emotion in the field
- 1. Studying emotion in the field Tyler Schnoebelen Berkeley Fieldwork Forum Oct 19, 2011
- 2. Goals for this presentation • Emotion + language = fun – Understanding how language is used by speakers is what gives life to our documentation work – It pushes theory into more “human linguistics” – Besides, you can’t really ignore it even if you want to • A few things about Shabo (isolate, Ethiopia) • Techniques for studying emotion • Brainstorming questions and methods
- 3. Shabo
- 4. Shabo
- 7. gɪrma kowaji-k ati-e Girma ball-ACC kick-PAST "Girma kicked the ball ' gɪrma-k kowaji-k ati ʃe Girma-ACC ball-ACC kick MAL ‘Girma kicked the ball (although someone else wanted it) ' Malefactives
- 8. Urdu’s ko Shabo’s –k(a(k)) Accusative object Anjum saw Saddaf-ko yu yun hεllεt-kak yε 3.m.sg another bird-ACC saw ‘He saw another bird.’ Accusative causee Anjum caused Saddaf-ko to laugh kuku ɗebe-k tiŋ-kak ɗa-mb-e you ??-? 1.m.sg-ACC cry-CAUS-PST ‘You made me-kak cry.’ Dative object Anjum gave the letter to Saddaf-ko yu ungo-k ʃatini-k ik hamm-e 3.m.sg 3.f.sg-ACC box-ACC {complex} give-PST ‘He gave the box to her.’ Dative subject Omair-ko got the prize <no evidence> Dative subject who-ko have vision <no evidence> Dative subject Nadya-ko has to go to the zoo <no evidence> Adverb Omair went for a walk-ko <no evidence> ko marked clause Nadya is about to make-ko tea ufetal-ka no-ka tiŋ ɗεtu-m hospital-TO go-?? 1.m.sg must-PROG ‘I must go to the hospital.’ Spatial adverb The luggage reached home-ko jalli ɗεbe-k Yer-ka jo am-e yesterday ??-?? Yeri-TO return come-PST ‘Yesterday he returned to Yeri.’ Temporal adverb The thief came at night-ko Tuli-wεci-ka ɗebe-k ap kitt-e day-all-ACC ??-?? {complex} stand-PST ‘We stood all day.’
- 9. Dutch tet “Underscores the polarity of the clause and expresses either irritation or surprise, as if he or she had expected the opposite state of affairs” (Craenenbroeck & Haegeman, 2007, p. 175)
- 11. Cantonese -k at the end of particles “An emotion intensifier” (Sybesma & Li, 2007)
- 12. Tongan si’i and si’a Different determiners express sympathy to the DP they head (Hendrick, 2005)
- 13. Thai thîi Complementizer for verbs of emotion/evaluation (Singhapreecha, 2010)
- 14. Navajo =go Emotional evaluation in narrative (Mithun 2008)
- 15. Korean Evidentials and psych predicates Non-evidential sentences are more assertive/informational, evidential sentences about the speaker are more “expressive” and “spontaneous” (Chung 2010)
- 16. East Caucasian lgs Case for emotion experiencers ≠ perception experiencers Van den Berg (2005)
- 17. Manambu Dative-purposive case can be a “frustrative”, something done in vain (Aikhenvald, 2008)
- 18. Zapotec Voice quality * Falsetto: Respect to godparents, God * Whisper: Important messages * Breathy: Scolding, demanding * Creaky: Commiserating (Sicoli 2009)
- 19. What else? • Diminutives • Word order • Intonation melodies • (The list goes on) • In Shabo: – 18 pronouns—can they be used for familiarity/insult (like tu/vous?) – subu is the word for ‘hot’—can it be used emotionally (and for what? Anger? Sex?) – ɓaɓu is the word for ‘liver’, is it the seat of any of the passions?
- 20. A linguistic/cultural project • Describe the emotional categories that Shabos themselves use. – Emotions are ideologically structured: there are good and bad times to express feelings. – Feelings and expressions associated with them differ in the types of socio-linguistic categories (men and women, to take a simple example). – What is “common sense”? – We’ll find feeling rules and display rules for emotions by looking at how people discuss emotions—whether those of fictional characters, neighbors, or their own.
- 21. Methods • Elicitation • Cultural narratives (e.g., myths) • Personal stories (think ‘danger of death’) • Dialog/interaction – Natural…acted, too? (“make a radio drama”) • Participant observation
- 22. Elicitation • Elicitation – Vocabulary – Faces – Stories – Mapping faces to stories
- 23. 2 minutes, go! • List all the emotions you can in two minutes – As Wilce (2010) points out, not all languages have a cover term like “emotion” – But “feelings” probably works – You probably do have to give examples, which is a little problematic, methodologically
- 24. Get the basic vocab • Big debate about small set of basic emotions • And whether these exist or not, people are interested in culture-specific concepts – Liget, the intense emotion of headhunting (Ilongot) – Amae, love in displays of dependence (Japanese)
- 25. Ekman photos
- 28. Types of situations • There are several main situations that give rise to emotions. – Negative situations • Danger • Threats of loss • Violations of cultural codes (by other or by self) – “Positive problems” • What to do when you get something • How do you maintain positive bonds with others? – Politeness and emotion go hand-in-hand
- 29. Scenarios • X is in Y situation: – What would he/she be thinking – What would onlookers think/feel – What would people do – Is there a name for this kind of event – Why do people feel and act as they do in this situation
- 30. Examples • Pilatos accidentally broke his favorite machete which he had had for a long time. • Dagim is at a wedding and everyone is having a good time. • Israel is alone in the bush and suddenly confronted by a dangerous animal, he has no weapon to defend himself with. • Babylon’s boss offers her a ride to Tepi, even though it is out of his way
- 31. Follow-up questions • In situation X, what would you feel/do? – What would your wife/sister/husband/father/etc feel/do? – What kind of face would you make? – What kind of sound would you make? (trying for sounds, not words)
- 32. Davitz (1969) • 50 emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust) • EACH rated for compatibility with 556 sensations: – “An inner warm glow, a radiant sensation” – “My blood pressure goes up; blood seems to rush through my body” • N=1,200, though not a good representation of America (subjects took 30 minutes per emotion and did all 50 emotions) • I redo this, cutting down first to 269 sensations, then to 88. • Run on Mechanical Turk (less onerous methodology), n=119
- 35. Cultural narratives • Myths give us emotions in the context of language, culture, and history • They can become scenarios for consideration • Among the Shabo, only elders get to tell myths/legends – Ask them to comment on stories – Individually, ask community members which stories they like best and why – Discuss morals, characters, and emotions
- 36. Personal narratives • Ethnographic and sociolinguistic interviews – Ask community members to tell special and quotidian stories • Danger of death – How do they perceive themselves and others? • In Yeri, I have good luck – Dagim – Not emotional (actually, he’s rather quiet) – But he’s the official village mediator (marital conflicts, neighbor conflicts, etc) – He can describe types of expressions people use when they are feeling strong emotions – Not necessarily the same notions of privacy as we have, but still best to move carefully
- 37. Some things to watch for • “Display rules” • Do people have control over their emotions? • Multilingual data
- 39. Outcomes • Myths and personal narratives, translated and annotated – "A close reading of two Shabo myths" – “The emotional life of the Shabo” • “Emotion terms and expressions" – “Expressions of joy and solidarity" – "How to fight in Shabo" – Stimuli and notes on the their effectiveness • “An emotional grammar of Shabo” – "The syntax and pragmatics of the malefactive in Shabo" – “Affection, insult, and the use of 18 pronouns”
- 40. Resources • Fieldwork and emotions: – Le Guen, Olivier. 2009. The ethnography of emotions: a field worker's guide. In Asifa Majid (ed.), Field Manual Volume 12, 31-34. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. • http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/2009/ethnography-of-emotions/ – Sauter, Disa. 2009. Emotion concepts. In Asifa Majid (ed.), Field Manual Volume 12, 20-30. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. • http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/2009/emotion-concepts/ • Excellent, example-filled overviews of language and emotion: – Besnier, N. (1990). Language and affect. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19(1), 419–451. • My notes: http://www.stanford.edu/~tylers/notes/emotion/Besnier_1990_reading_notes_Schnoebelen.pdf – Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (1989). Language has a heart. Text-Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 9(1), 7–26. • My notes: http://www.stanford.edu/~tylers/notes/emotion/Ochs_Schieffelin_1989_reading_notes_Schnoebelen .pdf – Stankiewicz, E. (1964). Problems of emotive language. In T. Sebeok, A. Hayes, & M. Bateson (Eds.), Approaches to Semiotics (pp. 239-264). The Hague: Mouton.
- 41. APPENDIX
- 43. Us-ness • Examples: – Breathiness in Japanese (Campbell 2004) – Palatalization in Yiddish and Basque
- 44. Palatalization • The unusual calls attention to itself. In Basque, there is compulsory palatalization in some contexts. People write oilo but say oillo ('chicken'), they write baina but say baigna ('but'), they write ilargia but say illargia ('moon'). • • But there is also expressive palatalization, which as in many languages, can serve as a marker of intimacy or pejoration. The normal word for 'man' is gizona--but gixona means something like 'a little man with no force', by contrast aita is 'father', but one uses atta to be more affectionate. • • The strongest consequences come when 'man' would've done but 'little man with no force' is used. Expressive palatalization probably does tend to call attention to itself, but its absence can too--if you call your father atta but in one interaction call him aita, that calls attention to a possible shift in the relationship or how it is viewed, at least momentarily. • • To borrow Bruno Latour's phrasing for my own purposes, the unusual is how matters of fact (the name you call someone) turn into matters of concern. "The speaker could have said X, but instead they said Y."
- 45. teasing, begging, apologizing, oaths, praises, insults, compliments, assessments, complaints, accusations, blessings, joking, shaming, ridiculing, hortatives, laments, placations
- 46. Korean examples
- 49. Cantonese: lo3-k
Editor's Notes
- (A first draft of this was previewed in my informal talk at the Stanford Linguistics Fieldwork Lab the day before, which was called “Fieldwork and feelings”. Oct 18, 2011.)
- The creation of a grammatical description and reliable documentation is also required for the second goal of my research project, namely a thorough study of the expression of emotions Shabo. Human beings have a fundamental need to transmit and evaluate emotions. The referential function of language is important, but emotional orientation is crucial for the listener to properly interpret the statements and respond appropriately. The study of the linguistic expression of emotions, at the interface between language and culture, is undeveloped outside the major European languages. This part of my research project is also relevant to sociolinguists, linguistic and cultural anthropologists, the pragmatists, and psychologists.
- Shabo is located here in the coffee plantations of SW Ethiopia. There are perhaps 300-400 Shabo speakers, making the language one of the most seriously endangered in Africa. The Shabos, who live in a mountainous region in western Ethiopia, were hunter-gatherers until very recently. According to their oral tradition and those of their neighbors, they are the only indigenous groups from the region. Most of the few works on the language Shabo focused on its genealogical classification: Bender (1977, 1983), and Teferra Unseth (1989), Fleming (1991) and Ehret (1995). This work is based on lists of words that have a number of errors. I have personally collected data more reliable (Schnoebelen 2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c) and have shown that the prior classification of the phylum Shabo Nilo-Saharan is unfounded. To search for other possible related languages, I adapted the techniques of biological classification with the classification language. None of the possible candidates has proven not to be related Shabo. In addition to these publications on the classification, there is a grammatical sketch of 16 pages per Teferra Anbessa (1991), who also published a brief description of phonological (1995). To this we must add the work on the phonology and grammar of Aberra (1998, 2004), and my own work. We want to document and preserve Shabo, not just for future community members, but also because it helps us understand African prehistory.
- One of the things I was actually looking for when I chose Shabo was for a multilingual community—the southwest of Ethiopia not only has multilingualism, but it has people fluent in a number of genetically unrelated languages.
- Up in the rafters you can spot one of my consultants, Dagim, working on his house in 2007. Dagim is typical of Shabo speakers—he’s fluent in Shabo, Majang (a Nilo-Saharan language of the Surmic genus) and Shekkacho (also known as Mocha, an Omotic language in the Afroasiatic phyla). He also knows some Amharic and Kafa.
- Here’s Dagim’s house a year later. Most of the people in this photo are Majangir, though the Shabo also live alongside the Shekkacho. There aren’t any Shekkacho in Yeri, though there has been a large influx of Amhara, Oromo, and Kafa. The Shabo are seen as being original to the area, with Majangir being relatives who moved in later. (I lived in Yeri for a month in 2008, documenting Shabo, Shekkacho, and Majang simultaneously. Most of my elicitation sessions were behind the doors in the photo above.)
- During my last stay in Shabo, I also discovered a malefactive particle (well, “particle” is a bit of a question mark right now) allowing speakers to describe situations in which someone does something nasty. Note that the agent of the malefactive sentence (Girma) is marked with the suffix of the accusative. In the absence of malefactive, the agent is not marked. This gives us the impression (and there’s other evidence) that –k is more than a simple ACC case marker.
- [1] In Urdu, there are some animacy/definiteness restrictions at play here (see Ahmed 2006: 10). For example, while you can see Saddaf-ko, you simply see a/the boat-0. In Shabo, it seems that you use –k(a(k)) whether the object is human, animal, spear, moon, etc. (Though I do have a single instance where a car that’s being seen doesn’t take any case marker at all.)
- Diphthongs are characteristic of spoken Czech in Prague, it can also be used to convey or intensify pejorative or affectionate meanings
- The –k that’s appended to Cantonese particles is an “emotion intensifier” (Sybesma & Li, 2007).
- Thai has two complementizers—verbs of evaluation and emotion use thîi (Singhapreecha, 2010).
- In Navajo, =go normally serves as a subordinate marker, but it can also appear in utterances where there is no matrix sentence. When it is used this way (as in narration), it marks emotional evaluation and background information (see Mithun (2008) on Navajo as well as other languages that have similarly behaving subordinate markers).
- Chung (2010) points out that simple psyche predicates in Korean are rarely used to describe a third person. That is, coh (‘be good’) and sulphu (‘be sad’) almost always describe the speaker’s emotions. These predicates can be used with or without evidential markers, but it is non-evidential sentences that are more assertive and seem to offer “new information” to the hearer. Evidential sentences with simple psyche predicates—even though they are reporting the speaker’s feelings—seem more “expressive” and “spontaneous”. More broadly, Chung (2010) is showing that evidentials don’t seem to be purely epistemic—not only are they used for direct witnessing, but they are also used to show the speaker’s attitude, their “psychological distance”, “weakened reliability”, and “lack of responsibility”.
- Emotions also get discussed when talking about case-marking of experiencers and categorization of verbs: It’s common for languages to use dative case to mark experiencers—as in Telugu (Haddad, 2009). As van den Berg (2005) describes, the East Caucasian languages actually split emotion verbs from perception verbs and mark the experiencers with different case (in Godoberi and Tsakhu, the emotional experiencer gets dative case, while the perception experiencer gets affective case, in Avar, the perception experiencer gets the superessive case).
- Let’s say you are talking about someone who was looking for their mother. If you mark “mother” with the dative-purposive case, then you are indicating that they are looked in vain.
- Pitch in Zapotec (Sicoli 2007) We know that pitch plays an important role is signaling and interpreting emotions as Grice, Baumann, & Jagdfeld (2009) mention in passing.
- Shabo grammar of complex and has several unusual features. For example, with 18 pronouns (masc / fem, 1/2/3, singular / dual / pl), the paradigm of personal pronouns is exceptionally rich. Shabos verbs are also remarkable because the person, number, tense and aspect are marked on both sides of the verbal root. In addition, the cutting Shabo the past and the distant past the recent past, which is rare in this part of Africa. Existing word lists do not contain information on the emotional value of words or phrases on the metaphors or idiomatic. "Hot" said Subu, but we do not know if this word is used metaphorically and if it is, what it means (anger, sexual arousal?). The idioms and metaphors can also enrich our knowledge of the morphology and syntax of the language. These are the types of language resources, the study will be a priority in my research: figurative language, the maléfactif, pronouns politeness and rudeness. Ideophones? Dingemanse has them mostly around perception. Diminutives, as in Spanish, have emotional uses and consequences (Oltra-Massuet & Arregi, 2005). Kinyarwanda diminutive/augmentative noun affixes do both positive and negative affect. Metaphors also get used to express emotions, as in the languages of Southeast Asia, which Gerner (2005) points out even have a special word order. In fact, word order also plays a role in Romanian, where switching word order and inserting a definite order increases the “emotional weight” (Hill, 2007). For example, turning dragi cititori (‘dear readers’) into cititorillor dragi (‘readers-the-VOC dear’) makes it more evocative. Watching sign language in use, one is bound to notice the expressivity and ask, as a number of researchers do, how manual and nonmanual signals are used (Cecchetto et al., 2009; Demey & van der Kooij, 2008; Meir, Padden, Aronoff, & Sandler, 2007; Quinto-Pozos, 2007).
- One goal is to identify and categorize the semantic fields that emerge from these expressions by studying how people discuss their own feelings and those of fictional characters.
- Cultural frames of reading faces, “How does the face look” Then, do “How does he/she feel?” Is there a word for that feeling. Ask them to make faces.
- Ekman and colleagues are interested in what parts of the face do what. For us, these pictures are mostly stimuli to get vocabulary—”angry”, “wincing”, “to wink”, “like he just had a child”, etc.
- Mind Reading Emotions Library MREL This demonstrates just one of the 412 emotion pages from the Emotions Library section. For samples of the other sections view the full Shockwave Demo. Click on the single image in the top right to see a full screen presentation of the video. Clicking on the tabs will display different information about the emotion. The video quality is less good than in the product itself in order to be accessible online at a reasonable speed.
- Ethical standards of documentary linguistics, including informed consent and confidentiality will be strictly adhered to. In ethnographic interview, questions revolve around what people will feel/think/want/see/hear in the contexts. Try to get the inside feeling. What would normally happen? What should happen?
- The Shabos not having settled in villages only recently, they are generally minor. To maintain a certain harmony in the villages where I investigate, I will work in parallel languages and Majang shekkacho. These two languages are also poorly studied. The Shabo, the Majang shekkacho and are not related genetically or typologically, but their speakers live near each other. Thus, we can study how the expressions of emotions are diffused between languages. We will consider, for example, how the curses of a language are used in a different language, with words and metaphors that are adopted and how they evolve in their use and meaning.
- Take the archaic form of the accusative plural of masculine nouns -y, in Polish. It's archaic and means solemnity in literature/poetry, but in non-poetic speech it is ironic or pejorative coloring.